Nonsense

Nonsense can take many forms and convince many otherwise intelligent people. Nowhere in the world of nonsense, however, is this more absurd or more lamentable than in the case of GMOs. If you don't know, that stands for Genetically Modified Organism. You see, just about every organic being of which you can think, from unicellular, to plant, to animal has been genetically modified to better serve the needs of humanity. That may sound immoral, unsafe, or otherwise undesirable to you, but we've been doing it for a very long time. By that, I don't mean for decades or for centuries, but for millennia. Oh, we didn't understand genetics in any real sense until Gregor Mendel came along and figured it out, but we've been practicing selective breeding in horses and dogs long before that.

In order to understand the importance of selective breeding, it is helpful to understand evolution by natural selection. Darwin knew that his audience well understood horse and dog breeding, as many people's lives depended on some aspect of this process during his time. Dogs bred for hunting had short legs and long ears, which kept their snouts to the ground and swept to scents, respectively. Dogs bred to retrieve game from water were bred with a coat that easily dries. In the absence of any human intervention though, the only traits specifically selected for will be the ones best suited to adapting to survive and reproduce. So the food we eat, whether vegetal or animal, is never optimized for our needs as a species. Fortunately, we have devised increasingly clever ways to change that.

Popular Christian spokesman Kirk Cameron argues that the world must have been made for man by God, citing the amazingly user-friendly banana as proof of this. Were he to encounter a wild banana though, he would not feel his argument so supported. These are tight little knots and quite inconvenient as a food source for humans. The fact of the matter is that the pre-Columbian meso-American peoples were quite good at botany and gave us the modern banana and all varieties of corn from what began as untenable wild fruit and slightly mutated grass, respectively. Modern genetically modified foods are no different from bananas or corn, in principle. All the GMO technology we possess today does genetic modification faster and more precisely than selective breeding, but speed and precision do not black magic make.

-Frank